17 October 2012

Just about to get started on the train from Montreal to Halifax, six-days-a-week service that will be unceremoniously cut to three at the end of October, a decision by fiat of the dictatorial, supra-parliamentary Stephen Harper conservative government, according to one of our fellow travelers. They’ve branded this service The Ocean, with a logo of a famous lighthouse.

Here in the ViaRail Montreal terminal they're queueing by the down escalator with the Halifax sign. An overweight man in a dirty orange T-shirt drops his Hello Kitty paraphenalia around him and settles in. Very odd. There is a queue of twenty or so, including one nun. We're across the way at a café. Two fat women are enjoying poutine, a dish with French Canadian origins comprising french fries, cheese and gravy.

As poutine has spread across Canada and come into its own, variants have popped up, like Mexican poutine, with jalapenos. These ladies sure were enjoying theirs, and the full-sugar version of Pepsi.

In Halifax there’s a lobster poutine, an egregious use of lobster. For $14, The Hart and Thistle offers Lobster Poutine Nova Scotia: Lobster morsels, cheese curds and lobster bisque topped with bernaise. Over fries.

A couple of days in the capital of Quebec suggest an obesity problem, if not the obesity epidemic in the U.S. Perhaps poutine is related?

By the late date when I set out to reserve a train compartment, the sleepers which included restaurant food were sold out so we've ended up in the most expensive accommodation, a large room with two beds located in the observation car at the back of the train. When I suggested that we'd thrown as much money at ViaRail as we could, the nice lady in the check-in Panorama Lounge (I think anybody who wanted to could use the Panorama Lounge) looked at the ticket and said "Yes you have."

10 February 2012

We've all done trips that were ... less fabulous ... than others. (Funny: Search "worst travel" on Amazon and the Lonely Planet guide to Ukraine comes in at number twelve.) Let's just say these are trips that involve more trials than, oh, losing your luggage. I can nominate my friend who had to have an emergency appendectomy in the Soviet Union in the mid-80's, for example. No, no, he didn't speak Russian.

Farther along on the scale, maybe, here's the Amazon description of the book The Worst Journey in the World: "hoping that the study of penguin eggs would provide an evolutionary link between birds and reptiles - a group of explorers left Cardiff by boat on an expedition to Antarctica. Not all of them would return. Written by one of its survivors, (this book) tells the moving and dramatic story of the disastrous expedition."

But the really worst worst trip might have been this one. Enjoy reading about it in front of your cozy, warm fireplace this weekend.

•••••

And then there's Cruise Passengers Overboard. Somebody out there has it in for mega-ships even more than me. They describe their site as "a comprehensive list of known cases of persons falling or jumping overboard since 1995. " This thing must take a lot of work. It's up to date as recently as seven days ago.

There are 192 U.N. member states. Kosovo, Taiwan and Vatican City aren’t U.N. members, so add them. Add South Sudan, to be born as the world’s newest country on 9 July. That’s 196 countries, and there are dozens and dozens of territories (Greenland is Danish, Tahiti is French, Aruba is Dutch and so on) and odd bits and specks of land all over the globe. There are plenty of places to choose from....

Keep an open mind. Do your online research. Pick a spot and just go. Buy a ticket, get on the plane, and go see what it’s like. Our world is a great big, sprawling pageant of color and chaos and diversity, and you should go out there and see it."

But use your travel dollars wisely. Now, a reprise from 2009:

•••••

Our mailbox is laden with expensive glossy catalogs from high end travel providers. Mountain Travel Sobek, “Celebrating 40 Years of Adventure Travel,” sends a very nicely done 204 page 2009 catalog offering, for a couple of examples:

12 days in Namibia for $7795 per person, starting and ending in Windhoek, including internal airfare and the company of others (price offered is for four or five people). Including Clara and Herb from Cleveland, your close proximity partners for nearly two weeks of Land Rover trips and box lunches, whom you’ll meet on arrival, this epic journey departs from Windhoek twice each year, on Mountain Travel Sobek’s schedule.

Or how about 13 nights in the Republic of Georgia from $3695 (again, not just you, but from 4 – 12 people)? This one starts in Tibilisi, twice a year, again on Mountain Travel Sobek’s schedule.

Not to fault Mountain Travel Sobek. This is what they do. You’ve seen the Perillo Tours ads for travel to Italy? Same thing. You’re buying it? They’re selling it.

So don’t buy it. Do your research and hire local people. They not only have local knowledge, but they’re also often quoting in local money, and the money you spend with them stays local.

My wife Mirja and I flew into Windhoek, for example, by ourselves, and spent a bare fraction of that group price. And it was simple:

02 July 2011

Americans love to visit London, Paris and Tuscany, but there are so many compelling places to go in this world. I say, go and discover someplace obscure!

There are 192 U.N. member states. Kosovo, Taiwan and Vatican City aren’t U.N. members, so add them. Add South Sudan, to be born as the world’s newest country on 9 July. That’s 196 countries, and there are dozens and dozens of territories (Greenland is Danish, Tahiti is French, Aruba is Dutch and so on) and odd bits and specks of land all over the globe. There are plenty of places to choose from.

So, how to pick your destination?

First, don’t rely on glossy travel magazines – and they know who they are – for travel advice, or you’ll never get out of the London/Paris/Naples/luxury hotels cocoon. All that press a few months back about Tibet as the new hip destination – that was all because the Starwood chain (Sheraton, Westin) opened a new high-end St. Regis hotel in Lhasa. See Travel+Leisure, for example.

Now, next time we’re in Lhasa maybe I'd like to stay at the St. Regis, too. But be aware of what you’re getting as travel advice from the glossy magazines. As a rule of thumb, be wary of anything in a magazine that’s bracketed by ads for Tag Hauer watches and Louis Viutton luggage. Whatever it is, it’s just marketing words.

Don’t be overly swayed by guidebooks and their “dangers and annoyances” sections. It’s no surprise that there’s the danger of pickpockets in poor African countries. The answer to that: Don’t carry valuables in your pockets.

Keep an open mind. Do your online research. Pick a spot and just go. Buy a ticket, get on the plane, and go see what it’s like. Our world is a great big, sprawling pageant of color and chaos and diversity, and you should go out there and see it.

And this summer, don’t let “experts” steer you onto the too-well-trodden path. Imagine: No more sitting in a left bank café disdaining the waiters who disdain you right back for trying to use your high school French. It’s liberating.

Tomorrow I'll link to a few tools I use to start the process of deciding where to go.

Juba is the only city most anybody can name in South Sudan, and yet it may not remain the capital. The International Business Times reports that:

"South Sudanese leaders said on Sunday they were considering building a new capital after their expected independence as the current hub Juba lacked infrastructure and space for new business."

Just after the collapse of Yugoslavia the provincial capitals of Ljubljana and Podgorica, in particular, seemed unlikely national capitals (of Slovenia and Montenegro, respectively), and so, surely, does Juba right now. Newser unkindly calls it "the mud-hut town of Juba" in an article about some of the things Juba will need:

"Juba is oil-rich but lacks the embassies and skyscrapers of other world capitals. There was only a mile or two of pavement here just a year ago, and the local archives are stored in a tent."

There are other towns in South Sudan. You just can't name any. But the Financial Times can. They've been outside Juba:

"The Grand Hotel Bentiu, in the capital city of Unity state about 900km north of Juba, is a case in point. The hotel might have bucket showers and curtains tethered with cut-off plastic bottles, but it counts as five stars in the dusty town of rickshaws and thatch."

30 December 2010

Most of us world travel fans who studied our maps in school will be able to tell you that Ashgabat is the capital of one of the five Stans that emerged from the Soviet Union - Turkmenistan, to be exact. NPR reporter Frank Langfitt didn't know where Ashgabat is, but he filed an entertaining little piece yesterday on "extreme travelers," in which he interviewed two of the top-ten-ranked people at mosttraveledpeople.com.

Just personally, as far as "where you've been" websites go, I like passportstamp.com better. Mosttraveledpeople.com is klunkier to get your information into, and passportstamp.com lets you map your visited countries on a fun little map you can use elsewhere, like so:

22 July 2010

Readers of the Financial Times Weekend will be familiar with Tyler Brûlé, the peripatetic columnist who flies internationally like a fiend, and who wants you to know that he'd fly in better-than-first-class if only it were available.

He publishes a magazine called Monocle, available for a £75 annual subscription (which is $114.43 today according to the handy currency converter on the right of this page). It would be nice if you could help Mr. Brûlé with his next international airline ticket by dropping by the Monocle online shop. Perhaps you could buy a tiny bag of wood, which is currently priced at $190.

16 July 2010

Yesterday I suggested people are acting strangely, and what the world needs now is vacations for all.

France will shortly be closing for the month of August, the way it does. This year they have a terrific political scandal to obsess on, involving cash-stuffed envelopes, an elderly heiress and French politicians, including one N. Sarkozy. If you haven't taken a few minutes to brief yourself, do, because you'll want to play along at home. Anne Applebaum has a nice primer.

(In the course of its own scandal primer, Sarkozy's Summer of Scandal, the Independent surveys the casualties and writes, as if it's a simple, plain fact that "... former prime minister Dominique de Villepin, has started his own
anti-Sarko party but tends to botch his projects."

As Pierre Charon once said, "You
can be tall, handsome and arrogant and lose.")

*****

In arguing for vacations for all, I cited the heat.

We're off to Helsinki in a couple of weeks. On Tuesday southern Finland hit highs not seen in 76 years: 34.2 C, or 93-1/2 degrees.There's not a lot of air conditioning in Finland and retailers in the southern part of the country have run out of fans.

We remain sanguine. Our little cabin is about a third of the way up the country outside Varkaus, and just a few yards from the lake. Plus, last time Mirja and I visited in August it was downright chilly - too cold in fact - with rain and highs around 12 (55).

*****

We've built a trip comprising Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Belarus. The first four countries are happy for us to come by and leave a few Euros behind. As for Belarus, though: Not so fast.

In the cold war days you'd typically need an invitation to visit suspicious Communist countries. That's mostly a thing of the past, and the Belarussian Consulate General's web site tells us, that citizens of some countries, including the U.S., don't need an invitation for visits of a month or less.

Except that they wouldn't approve our visa requests without an invitation.

The Belarussian officials in Washington provided a fax with seven suggested travel agencies that could help us. I emailed all seven. Four
emails bounced back as undeliverable. One company never replied. The other two offered to help if I'd cancel our hotel reservation and rebook through them, and pay in full in advance. And pay their fees for handling the paperwork.

I called the hotel, the Crowne Plaza Minsk, and Julia in the tours department has apparently handled everything. I faxed her a photocopy of the front and back of my Visa card and our passport details. She sent the invitations to Washington and faxed a copy to me. They'll put 45 Euros each on our hotel bill.

Our passports, stamped with visas, are due out of the Belarussian embassy today. If this works out, we'll have our passports back next Tuesday. Stay tuned.

Close enough to the same that I'm wondering why I spent multiple hours on a gorgeous morning painstakingly clerking in every trip all the way back to my first drive to Canada in 1980 (Or maybe it was 1979).

But I know why, really. It was in the spirit of competition. See, you'll be ranked among the other site members, stacked up against the competition, sized up and told where you stand. And our results weren't bad:

105 countries visited, ranking 109th overall. Our most-visited countries are the predictable European ones, and many are because they were transit stops on the way elsewhere. The top ten: Germany 11 visits, Finland 9, Austria & France 8, Thailand 7, Italy, Russia, Switzerland & the UK 6, and China 5.

04 May 2009

My web friend and fellow southerner (at least he lives in the south nowadays), Rick Ingersoll, aka the Frugal Travel Guy, is taking us all along on his round-the-world vacation. He and his wife Katy are now in the Swiss Alps. Follow along on his blog.

Our own big round-the-world adventure began the day after Christmas 1994 and lasted until April 1995, covering 22 countries, and we've since done two more, shorter RTW trips. In 1995, there were no blogs, so the only coverage that lives on is the occasional story from back then (some of which are here).

In a couple of months, though, we invite you to join us here on CS&W as we explore Urumqi & the Kashi (Kashgar) Sunday market in western China, and then cross the 12,310 foot (3752 meter) Torugart Pass into Kyrgyzstan and travel on to Kazakhstan from there.

16 April 2009

Our mailbox is laden with expensive glossy catalogs from high end travel providers. Mountain Travel Sobek, “Celebrating 40 Years of Adventure Travel,” sends a very nicely done 204 page 2009 catalog offering, for a couple of examples:

12 days in Namibia for $7795 per person, starting and ending in Windhoek, including internal airfare and the company of others (price offered is for four or five people). Including Clara and Herb from Cleveland, your close proximity partners for nearly two weeks of Land Rover trips and box lunches, whom you’ll meet on arrival, this epic journey departs from Windhoek twice each year, on Mountain Travel Sobek’s schedule.

Or how about 13 nights in the Republic of Georgia from $3695 (again, not just you, but from 4 – 12 people)? This one starts in Tibilisi, twice a year, again on Mountain Travel Sobek’s schedule.

Not to fault Mountain Travel Sobek. This is what they do. You’ve seen the Perillo Tours ads for travel to Italy? Same thing. You’re buying it? They’re selling it.

So don’t buy it. Do your research and hire local people. They not only have local knowledge, but they’re also often quoting in local money, and the money you spend with them stays local.

My wife Mirja and I flew into Windhoek, for example, by ourselves, and spent a bare fraction of that group price. And it was simple:

19 January 2009

Moscow is regularly rated the world’s most expensive city nowadays. Okay, it's an important national capital, nouveau riche, historic hub of empire.

So what's up with Kazakhstan? Yes, it's a national capital these days, too, but it was merely a provincial outpost hardly connected by paved roads to the rest of that empire.

We'll be in Almaty this summer and I'm making arrangements. I started with the two big international chains with hotels there, Hyatt and InterContinental, and I started with regular rooms on the Club Level.

Converted from the Tenge (which sounds more like, oh, maybe a Christmas ornament) spending a night on the InterContinental's Club Level will cost $700.59. And on the Hyatt Regency's Club Level, for a night in the room in the picture? Just $808.73.

15 January 2009

THE travel experience of 2009, I humbly propose, is the Total Solar Eclipse on 22 July. What makes it so irresistible? Totality is, at its maximum, six minutes 39 seconds. That's just phenomenally long. There won't be another totality this long during the lifetime of anyone who reads this.

The eclipse path, according to NASA, "begins in India and crosses through Nepal, Bangladesh, Bhutan, Myanmar and China.
After leaving mainland Asia, the path crosses Japan's Ryukyu Islands and curves southeast through the Pacific Ocean."

NASA has a fabulous resource. And Fred Espenak, an astrophysicist at NASA's Goddard Space
Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, is your guy for all things eclipse, at MrEclipse.com. You can immerse yourself there until you realize you really ought to get back to work.

04 December 2008

The world is made up of 757
countries, territories, autonomous regions, enclaves, geographically
separated island groups, and major states and provinces, according to MostTraveledPeople.com.

You can't use just countries as the measure of the world's places, because then Tahiti would be France and Greenland Denmark, which they're clearly not. I quibble with MostTraveledPeople.com that individual provinces should be distinct places though: what's the difference between one side or the other of the North/South Dakota border? Seems like just a way of running up the score.

On the other hand, it's all exhibitionism, and we all do it. We're proud of the just-over-one-hundred countries and territories we've visited and we've proudly displayed this countries-visited map here before:

This map can be manipulated, too, of course. Fly in and out of Moscow and it looks like you've been a whole lot more places than if you've visited a couple of dozen Caribbean countries.

Still, it's fun to read profiles of some of the most traveled people. Looks like they do a profile a day on their home page. Their most traveled person is Charles Veley (More: 1, 2, 3, 4), who says he's visited 709 places, with 48 remaining.

Common Sense and Whiskey is the companion to EarthPhotos.com, where you can see and buy professional photo prints from 105 countries and territories around the world, and the blog for Common Sense and Whiskey - the book. It's Intelligent discussion about the world out there.